Tianhe-1A: The supercomputer with more petaflops in the world

Posted on: Oct, 29th 2010

Its name is Tianhe-1A, is located in Tianjin (China) and can execute 2.507 petaflops, that is equivalent to 2.507.000.000.000.000.000 floating point operations per second. Is, therefore, the computer that execute more operations with decimals per second, this doesn't implies that is the more fast in the world, as others say, but is the more fast making this kind of operations.

In the same way as in North Corea, China is investing all the money of the country in technological development without taking into account the health services and others basic service of its population. Although the processors that use are all of american technology, the architecture of the computer and the network are own of China.

This supercomputer uses 262TB of RAM memory and 21.504 processors (7.168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14.336 Intel Xeon processors), while the prior supercomputer in the list of the top 500, the Cray XT5 Jaguar in Tennessee(U.S.), arrives to the 1.75 petaflops with a lot of more processors, in total 224.162 CPUs of general purpose, and, depending of the program that executes, will be or not more fast than the Tianhe-1A.

This power in floating point operations have been achieved thanks to the investment of graphical processors (GPUs), although this fact suppose a detriment of other type of operations. This architecture used in the Tianhe-1A, have been though by the engineer of the University of National Defense Technology of China because the kind of studies that are going to do with this supercomputer need a user more intensive of this kind of operations.

Actually they are using it to probe projects of weather prediction and detection of oil spots in the sea form satellite photograph. By general, is useful to any task that can be parallelized, in the same way as any other supercomputer, the difference is that the design of this is innovator. Although in America did something similar when they build a supercomputer with Playstation 3.